Saturday, April 17. 2010

We just finished the first draft of the last chapter of our book: First look at PostGIS WKT Raster. This completes our hard-core writing and now on to more drafting,
polishing all the chapters.
In Chapter 13 we demonstrate how to use PostGIS WKT Raster functions by example and cross breed with PostGIS geometry functionality. I was pleasantly surprised to see how nicely the raster and geometry functions play together.

We had intended this chapter to be short about 20 pages in length, because how much can one say about pixels and pictures. As it turns out, a lot.
Rasters are more versatile than their picture portrayal on a screen. Rasters are a class of structured storage suitable for representing any numeric,
cell based data where each cell has one or more numeric properties (the bands). This covers quite a bit of data you collect with remote sensing and other electronic instrumentation. We had to stretch to over 30 pages; even then we felt we were missing some critical examples.

There is a lot of useful functionality in PostGIS WKT Raster
already and should make a lot of people looking for raster support in PostgreSQL very happy. Although the chapter may portray some scenes of violence and torture inflicted on elephants, you can rest assured
that it is pure illusion and no real elephants or blue elephant dolls were harmed in the making of this chapter.

As a side note -- our book is now listed on Amazon PostGIS in Action.
It is not available in hard-copy yet,but you can pre-order and of course you can order from PostGIS in Action from Manning directly
to get the chapter drafts we have posted, updates as we polish them, and the final book when it comes out in hard print.

The Amazon listing would have been so much more exciting, had they not stripped me of my last name or had Leo married to himself. UPDATE: It appears I now have a last name again
In hind sight, I suppose OBE is more commonly seen as a title of honor rather than a last
name, so its only fitting that I should be stripped of mine and Tim Berners-Lee gets it tacked on at the end of his name.

To find out more about PostGIS WKT Raster, we encourage you to check out these links.